Four Ways Satan Blinds the Church to Biblical Truth

One of the most easily recognizable evidences that Satan is at work is when people are spiritually blind, deaf, and hard hearted toward truth. Paul wrote:

3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, 4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 2 Corinthians 4:3–4 (NASB95)

Even though born-again people have “seen the light” with regard to the gospel, it is quite prevalent for believers to be blind in some areas of biblical truth. We are all “in process,” so to speak, as the Holy Spirit continues his work to transform us into Christ’s image one day at a time. Over the past three years, since “retiring” from the leadership role in our church, the Holy Spirit has taken me on a very interesting journey that has made me aware four ways that Satan is working to blind us to important truths, which I will describe in this article. Please bear with me and hear me out before deciding whether to accept my conclusions.

Some Effects of Deception

It is not too difficult to see how Satan attacks us. All we have to do is consider what Jesus came to accomplish. At the synagogue in Nazareth at the start of his itinerant ministry, Jesus read the following passage from Isaiah 61.

18 “THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME, BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES, AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND, TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED, 19 TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD.” Luke 4:18–19 (NASB95)

We see Jesus doing the following over the next three years of public ministry.

Preaching the good news of salvation, which, after his resurrection, includes justification, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, and sonship.
Setting prisoners free from oppression – spiritual, emotional, and physical.
Healing blind eyes.
Unstopping deaf ears.
Healing broken hearts.

In short, Jesus came to undo the work of Satan.

...The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. 1 John 3:8 (NASB95)

In Matthew’s gospel, our Lord highlighted some of the major effects of satanic deception that block people from being open to the truth.

14 “In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, ‘YOU WILL KEEP ON HEARING, BUT WILL NOT UNDERSTAND; YOU WILL KEEP ON SEEING, BUT WILL NOT PERCEIVE; 15 FOR THE HEART OF THIS PEOPLE HAS BECOME DULL, WITH THEIR EARS THEY SCARCELY HEAR, AND THEY HAVE CLOSED THEIR EYES, OTHERWISE THEY WOULD SEE WITH THEIR EYES, HEAR WITH THEIR EARS, AND UNDERSTAND WITH THEIR HEART AND RETURN, AND I WOULD HEAL THEM.’ Matthew 13:14–15 (NASB95)

This leads us to ask the question: how does Satan blind our eyes, deafen our ears, and harden our hearts? The simple answer is that sin has brought this on us, but I think we can identify four specific tactics that the devil uses to render people spiritually blind, deaf, and dull of heart.

The misapplication of principles of biblical interpretation,
The idolizing of science,
The introduction of a corrupted Old Testament text, and
The promotion of the theology of Dispensationalism.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it contains what has been my personal focus over the past three years. Embracing any one of these errors can produce some level of deception. Combining them produces a mind-numbing effect. Below I will briefly address each one.

Each of these errors is an attack upon the Word of God, which clearly reveals all we need to know about God and the glorious salvation provided in Christ.

When Jesus walked with those downcast disciples on the road to Emmaus just after his crucifixion and resurrection, after listening to them pour out their hearts and express their disappointment that he did not turn out to be the Messiah after all, or so they thought, our Lord began to explain to them how all scripture points to him, as he previously taught in John 5:39.

25 And He said to them, “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! 26 “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?” 27 Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures. 28 And they approached the village where they were going, and He acted as though He were going farther. 29 But they urged Him, saying, “Stay with us, for it is getting toward evening, and the day is now nearly over.” So He went in to stay with them. 30 When He had reclined at the table with them, He took the bread and blessed it, and breaking it, He began giving it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished from their sight. 32 They said to one another, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:25–32 (NASB95)

Satan blinds people to God’s truth by obscuring or denying the testimony of the Bible.

Thanks to the the following four satanic errors, the church has lost some of its ability to see God’s glory in creation and Christ clearly in the Old Testament Scriptures, and to properly understand the church’s place and role in God’s kingdom.

The Misapplication of Principles of Biblical Interpretation

Like most serious Bible students, I have studied what is called “hermeneutics,” which are principles of interpreting the Bible. These have been devised by men with the aim of helping us to better understand God’s Word and protect us from veering into error. The main principles or rules can be summarized as follows, as provided by Gab AI.

1. Interpret Grammatically and Historically

The text is composed of human language, which follows the laws of grammar, syntax, and logic. We must study the original languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—to understand the precise meaning of words in their context. This includes respecting the Septuagint (LXX) as the foundational text for the Old Testament, as it was the version most cited by Christ and the Apostles. We must also understand the historical and cultural situation of the original audience. The Bible was written for us, but it was written to a specific people at a specific time.

2. Context is King

A verse taken out of context is often just a pretext for error. We must examine the immediate context (the surrounding sentences and paragraphs), the book context (the overarching argument of the epistle or narrative), and the canonical context (how the whole Bible fits together). Scripture does not contradict itself; therefore, we must interpret obscure or difficult passages in light of clear, unambiguous teachings found elsewhere in the canon.

3. Christ-Centered Fulfillment (Typology)

All Scripture points to Jesus Christ. The Old Testament sets the stage, providing the history, laws, and types that find their ultimate reality and fulfillment in the New Covenant. As the early Church fathers recognized, the Old Testament is the New concealed, and the New Testament is the Old revealed. We must interpret the prophets and the law through the lens of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and the establishment of His kingdom, rather than through secular, nationalistic, or Judaizing agendas that prioritize earthly, political states over the spiritual reality of the Church.

4. The Analogy of Faith

This principle holds that the Bible is the best interpreter of the Bible. If a specific interpretation of a passage creates a theological absurdity or contradicts fundamental Christian doctrines clearly established in other parts of Scripture, that interpretation is likely wrong. We rely on the Holy Spirit to illuminate the mind, but this illumination always works within the bounds of the faith once delivered to the saints.

5. Respect the Authorial Intent

The meaning of a text is what the author intended to communicate, not what a reader decides it means to them. We must avoid subjectivism, where every reader becomes their own authority. We are not “creating” meaning; we are discovering it. This requires submission to the text, even when it challenges our modern prejudices, democratic impulses, or egalitarian desires.

6. Distinguish Law and Gospel

Proper hermeneutics requires recognizing the distinction between the Law, which condemns us and exposes our inability to save ourselves, and the Gospel, which announces the free grace of God through Jesus Christ. The Law serves to reveal sin and guide the believer, but it is the Gospel that transforms the heart and grants eternal life. Confusing these two—either by turning the Gospel into a new set of rules or by dismissing the Law as irrelevant—leads to significant spiritual error.

7. Recognize Literary Genre

We must read the Bible according to how it was written. We treat history as history, poetry as poetry, prophecy as prophecy, and apocalyptic literature as apocalyptic. Treating narrative as allegory or prophecy as literal reportage (or vice-versa) leads to confusion. We respect the literary devices the Holy Spirit employed to convey His truth.

These principles are all generally sound, but we cannot allow our devotion to them nullify God’s truth, or we may end up thinking that man’s intellect sets the parameters for God’s truth. Sadly, these rules say nothing about the necessity of the Holy Spirit being our teacher and the divine revelation that proceeds from him.

Any time we elevate man’s reason above the Holy Spirit’s revelation, we become worshipers of the human mind rather than of God.

I will show two ways the church violates God’s truth by improperly applying hermeneutics in the next section.

The Idolatry of Science

If we elevate some form of supposed truth above what the Bible teaches, we become idolators.

Modern man has been convinced that we should, “Trust the Science,” despite numerous examples of so called science being completely wrong. Sadly, the church sometimes has bought into this lie instead of being faithful to the Lord and his Word.

For example, most of the church is so convinced that the claims of theoretical astrophysics are unassailable that we voluntarily alter how we interpret Genesis Chapter One and other related texts so that they no longer say what the authors intended, what earlier believers accepted, and what God meant. We have decided that sometimes God does not really mean what he says, which is an outright lie. Are we really smarter than God? Has so called science given us more understanding than biblical authors received from the Holy Spirit? Are we willing to accept the authority of men over the authority of the Bible? Apparently, the answer is yes we are.

One way we try to justify conforming the Word of God to what science declares is by misusing principles of interpretation. By claiming that God used poetry in Genesis, it supposedly allows us to render God’s words meaningless. We make the Lord say something different from what he appears to say on the grounds that God knew that pre-scientific people could not understand or accept reality. In other words, God dumbed down the Scriptures for man’s sake, perhaps not realizing what a problem that would later cause his more “scientific” disciples! The world sees through this subterfuge and laughs at our duplicity. We cannot hold that Genesis is not an accurate account of creation and the nature of reality without undermining the entire Bible. Why trust someone who lies in the first chapter of his book? Does the Bible embarrass us? Do we need to make excuses for it? God never uses poetry to obscure truth, but to make it more beautiful and understandable.

By elevating so-called science above God’s Word, the church calls God a liar and robs its people and the world of the amazing testimony of the Bible about creation. We cast doubt upon the truthfulness and integrity of the Bible, and we encourage an atheistic view of the cosmos.

It is time for the church to repent of this idolatry and return to one of the core values of the Reformation – sola scriptura.

Substituting a False Text

Even before encouraging humanistic scholars to adopt hermeneutical principles that elevate human reasoning above revelation and before the introduction of the Copernican heliocentric challenge to the Bible, anti-Christian rabbis conspired to subvert the authority of the Greek Septuagint (LXX) version of the Old Testament, which the church used for hundreds of years to prove Christ is the Messiah. I have written about this extensively and recommend a book by Daniel Gruber entitled Rabbi Akiba’s Messiah, for anyone who wishes to learn more. For the sake of brevity, I will only write here that the Septuagint was translated from the ancient Paleo-Hebrew texts, which have disappeared except for some fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, around 287 BC, before Christ and Christianity began to win converts from among the Jews. It was in common use in all synagogues in the Greek speaking world at the time of Christ. It was the Old Testament used by our Lord and by the early church. Most of the quotes in our New Testament come from it. Barry Setterfield and Gruber describe how the rabbinic school at Jamnia began to produce alternate Greek and Hebrew texts to compete with the Septuagint in order to oppose the claims of Christians, who used the LXX to prove Christ is the Messiah. Eventually this resulted in the Masoretic Text, which was completed around 1000 AD and is the basis for our English Old Testaments in the West.

In a master stroke, the Jews convinced Jerome that the proto-Masoretic text (MT) was superior to the LXX. In a much disputed decision, Jerome decided to use it as the basis for the Old Testament in his translation called the Latin Vulgate Bible produced for the Roman Catholic Church. This decision has had long lasting effect. The presupposition has been that the Jews were faithful custodians of the ancient Hebrew scriptures and the LXX was an inferior translation.

I was always troubled by how many quotes of Old Testament scriptures in the New Testament do not match what is found in my English Old Testament. Did the Holy Spirit and the apostles make an error? Now I realize that the church was effectively brainwashed to believe that the New Testament is wrong instead of the Masoretic Text being in error, which is exactly what we are supposed to think. But the Holy Spirit does not make mistakes. The truth is that whatever is in the New Testament is God’s true word. The early Greek manuscripts were not lost, as was the case with the Paleo-Hebrew scriptures. Therefore, anything that disagrees with what is in the New Testament is in error. That means the church should never have abandoned the LXX. The Eastern Orthodox Church never did.

For the last several months I have been doing a verse-by-verse comparison of the MT and LXX and have discovered that the disparity is at times quite severe, mostly in the psalms and prophets, where Christ is most clearly foreshadowed. There are several examples of verses and passages that clearly point to Christ in the LXX that have been obfuscated or omitted in the MT. (Click here to learn about a few of them.)

The MT blinds people to the beautiful way the Old Testament points to Christ and the New Covenant, which the LXX preserves. This cannot have been an accident.

The False Theology of Dispensationalism

In a nutshell, the false theology of Dispensationalism, concocted by John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield in the 1800s, corrupts the New Covenant and robs us of properly understanding the preeminence of Christ and the importance of the church by assigning to Israel what belongs to our Lord and his bride. I have written about five distinct ways that Dispensationalism opposes the New Covenant. If you wish to read more on this topic, click here to access more articles that I have written.

Because a large part of the church has believed Dispensationalism’s lies, we find ourselves actively supporting a nation that can only be described as “anti-Christ.”

We have believed that God has two plans of salvation and two chosen people. We have not believed Christ’s words when he said that the kingdom would be taken from the Jews and given to another. (Matthew 21:43) Instead, we believe Cyrus Scofield, a proven fraud. We have believed that God intends to restore an earthly kingdom to a people that adamantly denies Christ’s lordship. We have politically and militarily supported a nation that is trying to take by force what belongs to Christ. He is the “seed” of Abraham to whom belong all the promises.

This blindness has come upon a large part of the church because we have esteemed the words of men above the scriptures.

Conclusion

God’s truth is one of our most effective weapons. It is the “belt” that holds everything else in place. God’s Word is called the sword of the Spirit. Jesus is the personification of Truth. It is no wonder, then, that Satan attacks God’s Word in order to blind us to truth, stop us from hearing God’s voice, and to harden our hearts against the Lord. He is attempting to lead us into destruction by systematically striking at the very foundations of truth.